Monday, February 11, 2013
The mommies waved goodbye on the dock in Vineyard Haven. These were our babies and they looked shy and quiet and scared as they boarded the 108- foot schooner, The Shenandoah, a reproduction of a Confederate raider.
These kiddos would be adrift on the high seas for seven days around the Elizabeth Islands. Could they stand it? Could we? On the seventh day, when they returned to port, they would be totally transformed; diminutive pirates, tanned, tattooed with skulls and crossbones (these washed off over time), snarky and gnarly, and hanging from the bow-sprit. Later, back home, we heard our own sweet children belt out, “What do you do with a drunken sailor? ... Put him in bed with the captain’s daughter!” What elements went into making them hooligans and into granting them the greatest adventure of their – admittedly short thus far – lives? Recently I came across my son Charlie’s log from his fifth grade Shenandoah trip. It began on June 11, …
Monday, November 19, 2012
A guide to this town's glam past.
First you clap your eyes on those New Englandy church steeples as you sail into the harbor. It’s quaint. Lots of pretty stores, folks with two-and-three-seater strollers for their expensive broods of kids. And while the town’s restauranteurs have finally – finally! – been sanctioned to sell wine with their coq au vin– say, did the coq in earlier years need to be prepared without vin as in coq au Shirley Temple? Harder forms of booze are still verboten. That means no bars, no night life, no drunken sailors lurching onto shore to find damsels with high cleavage and low self-esteem. It’s . . . a trifle dull in Vineyard Haven which, for some cockamamie reason, is also-known-as Tisbury. Is it an evil twin thing? “I love Edgartown!” “There’s…
Monday, November 5, 2012
Along With Everybody Else Being Mean to Everybody Else in the First Half of the 20th Century on The Vineyard (It Doesn’t Happen Anymore, Right?)
Here’s the way it works: Mostly, human beings prefer to be in the company of people who are so identical to themselves, you wonder why we don’t simply clone our friends from our own DNA. Nowadays, of course, and particularly here on the Island, we’ve learned how fun and cool it is to know all varieties of humankind. Back in the day that wasn’t so practical because: Everybody here was Anglo-Saxon! Sounds kinda scary, doesn’t it?! Most of the Native population had been killed off, not by spears or guns but by those other scourges of white invasion: germs, alcohol, deprival of land and self-sustenance. In the first sixty years of white invasion, the Indian population declined by two-thirds. That’s before 1700! The 33% remaining got pushed to …
Monday, October 1, 2012
Come Spend a Healing Day on Martha’s Vineyard!
What could be better therapy for a modern-day Joan of Arc who has recently endured some 24 years under house arrest in her native Myanmar—the country formerly known as Prince, I mean Burma – than a fun day trip to our island? Having just spent her past week addressing students at Harvard and Yale (and, by the way, why do those schools always get the coolest speakers?), Ms. Suu Kyi may still be in this vicinity, so I’m going to be among the first, as one of her countless admirers, to invite her to our shores. Here is my proposed one-day dream itinerary, but I do invite Patch readers to send in their own suggestions: I’m imagining that Ms. Suu Kyi is traveling under the protection of our state department; so I’d like to request that those …
Michael West
3:05 pm on Monday, February 11, 2013
Holly, I really liked the part where the girl hit her head and got amnesia and somebody talked like a sailor and had a moustache. Somehow I think they should make the food a lot worse, maybe too much salt, and barbecue the parrot on spit. Sorry, just kidding...great story. more ›